The Industry

An AutoStream Op-Ed:

Conventional wisdom says print is dead. I say, check out this video and realize that print and Internet are but two battlegrounds in the same war for survival that media brands must fight to survive.

Complete article after the jump:

As magazines are making the transition from print to online, I see their brands have an opportunity for growth as they add video, interaction, community and media to their ability to tell a story.

This video comes up on top as the #1 keyword search under “Ford Mustang Drag Race” and it’s easy to see why. The GT500 smokes the Camaro as one would expect a 540hp car should. But it’s important to notice some points here. No longer is the top result for this search a user generated video. It’s now a professionally produced piece, that honestly has so many great camera angles and shots that it could pass for broadcast ready even though it was produced for online consumption.

For years now, the Internet has been heralded as the death of print, and indeed is has taken it’s toll as offline marketing dollars are being turned into online pennies, budgets shrink to the point that it’s almost impossible to budget production of a quality piece of media and recover money from it. It is a fact that companies are spending less on print and this is hurting newspapers and magazines as they struggle for online value.

It’s also a fact that there is less money online (and far more hands grabbing for it). When I started StreetFire, I remember a point in 2007 when we had more reach than all of Source Interlink’s properties combined, yet I couldn’t get a meeting with a single CMO to discuss a budget spend greater than a thousand dollars. Why? Because big reach doesn’t mean big brand, and you can’t argue that Hot Rod has less brand equity than StreetFire, even though it has only a fraction of the reach online. Brand Recognition gets you that meeting, it puts you on the short list of those to talk to, strong brand is sales grease.

Because StreetFire couldn’t get the big meeting, my answer was to win marketers over on price and solution. We would give away ads for a fraction what the big boys were asking, we would run contests at a loss, we would shoot video for them for free that others would charge for, all in the name of building our own brand recognition, which largely worked. I’m happy to say that for the time while I was running StreetFire we actually made a profit and continued to grow. It was a hard fight though, and with only three full time people on our team it wasn’t sustainable.

So what does this do? It gives the CMO of Ford thousands of scrappy start ups willing to give away the farm for free when the editor from Road and Track comes knocking on the door to talk online budgets. Their CPM (price per thousand of readers) has to be at least comparable to Jalopnik, StreetFire, LeftLaneNews, DragTimes, etc of the world. Some would view this as a race to the bottom as I can look at Road and Track’s Quantcast number, (424,000 unique visitors per month) and say that if they somehow made $10 per thousand readers, Road and Track has a solid $4,240/month to run their web site. Send a writer to Italy to cover the launch Ferrari’s new car, and you have not only blown your budget, you also don’t have cash to pay the web site engineers. Now I’m sure Road and TRack’s online divison makes more than that, but there is what is bankable and easy and then there is what is hard to sell.

How does Jalopnik and LeftLane get that same story? They just blog the local guy in Italy that walks down there with an iPhone and snaps the photos. Cost of breaking news coverage is well on the way to being free. But if Road and Track covered this story in the same manner, their brand would erode almost overnight, as being “no better” than the scrappy start ups. So what do you do?

You do what Bullrun is doing. Bullrun started as a coast to coast rally that was more of a party road trip than any sort of a real race. Because people that can take off for a week and pay the entry fee tend to be well off, and their cars reflect that, Corvettes, Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and Bentleys abound, the brand evolved to mean “rich people having fun on an exotic car road trip.” What do you do? You film it. the Bullrun team launched a successful line of DVDs covering cool cars driven by cool people doing cool things and obviously it worked smashingly well. Now Bullrun is a Rally and a DVD series, why not a website? That came next followed by a reality TV show with Season 1 on Spike and Season 2 on SPEED. Welcome to the future of media my friend, Bullrun is everywhere. They’re in your TV, they’re in your computer and they’re in your town. They come to where you are which is why they are now scoring huge media buys from even non endemic advertisers like Pepsi.

So what does a video of a Camaro racing a Mustang have to do with all this? Everything. Motor Trend has just become relevant online because that video is not sitting in a Brightcove player the way it does on Road Track’s web site. What does Brightcove matter? A Brightcove player means “you can only come to my site to enjoy this content properly”. A YouTube player means “we are creating content for communities to consume wherever you are.”

Again, as of today Thursday August 27th 2009:

• The top YouTube search result for “Ford Mustang Drag Race” is a Motor Trend Production.
• The top YouTube search result for “Ford Mustang Drag” is a Motor Trend Production.
• The top YouTube search result for “Ford Mustang” is a Car & Driver Production.
• The top YouTube search result for “Ford” is a Top Gear Production.

None of these videos are user generated, they are all professionally produced.

I forecast that by this time next year all the top enthusiast media on the UGC sites (YouTube and their ilk) will be professionally produced (and uploaded), so the race is on to determine which companies provide this top enthusiast content.

Why do I believe that? Because the economics work in a way they don’t if you just focus on how visitors interact with your brand only on your own web site. This Motor Trend video has in one month scored just shy of 170,000 views or about $1,700 potential revenue at that same $10 per thousand viewership number I quoted earlier. Can you properly shoot this video for $1,700? Perhaps if you run with cheap cameras and rent out the track to shoot more than one match up. It’s hard, but possible.

Ignoring your off site brand and only focusing on in-page consumption of your media is a recipe for failure.

In March 2009 StreetFire and Car Domain announced a corporate merger. Both are great sites with a rich history of past success that are currently trying to recover the business by cutting costs. Operationally there have been reports of massive lay offs in engineering and product development.  From an outsider perspective, neither company has launched any compelling off-site products to enhance their brand, and some have been abandoned (the StreetFire Podcast and “StreetFire Rides” MySpace app haven’t been updated in a long time and Vidiac, the company’s strongest network asset, it no longer running on their technology). The result has been close to a 30% drop in both sites online reach in a time span as brief as only 6 months.  (StreetFire’s Quantcast has recenlty been removed, and Car Domain’s is shown above). I fear they have lost their capability and will to reverse direction.

An investor once told me “You can’t cut your way to success” and in some ways I have to agree that is correct. You have to build something worth buying for people to consume it. Road and Track has gone through great efforts to follow Steve Millen’s Targa Newfoundland Nissan GT-R. This ongoing article features compelling articles, photography, engaging video and super cool subject, yet this Motor Trend Video on YouTube did 25% the reach of Road and Track’s entire website in one month. Why? Because as a Nissan GT-R enthusiast I want to see Road Track’s story unfold on “2009GTR.com”, “GTRBlog” and NAGTROC. Had Road and Track used YouTube, these sites would have been able to easily integrate Road and Track’s video into their community and present it to their GT-R readers who are ravenous to consume and SHARE GT-R content.

Go to any mustang website right now and I guarantee this Motor Trend Video is still making the rounds.

But there is another more compelling reason why the winner to create online enthusiast content could be a magazine brand. Pick up the phone and call YouTube’s business development department and tell them you would like to create a professionally produced car show for their site and you want them to feature it on the front door. The first question they’ll ask is “who are you?”, if you answer “Motor Trend magazine” YouTube is eager to do business with you because they know who you are and probably have your magazine sitting in the company bathroom for some light reading.

You see, despite the fact the economy is the tank right now, there is a brand land happening right now. You can either follow the herd and race to the bottom by “cutting costs” (a common euphemism for destroying lives in the form of firing employees, killing company moral, cutting salaries ….not really a forecast for future company greatness if you ask me.) OR you can do what Bullrun is doing, invest in future success by growing your brand recognition to the point key players like Pepsi are eager to do business with you. Old media has a head start in brand recognition there, but Bullrun proves you can be a start-up and still win at this too because no one wants to do business with a company who’s corporate mascot is the grim reaper.

I AM Ford Mustang Drag Race.